


This Is The Moment

by thewritingnymph



Category: RuPaul's Drag Race RPF
Genre: Drag Queens, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-10
Updated: 2018-01-10
Packaged: 2019-03-03 02:53:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,824
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13331964
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thewritingnymph/pseuds/thewritingnymph
Summary: Set pre-season 4, this tells the (not real) story of how Sharon made it onto RuPaul's Drag Race, despite her boyfriend auditioning every year.





	This Is The Moment

Good things happen to good people. That’s the unwritten law of the world, the way justice is dealt and the universe is kept in balance. Or at the very least, that’s how the world should work. But the world is cruel, unkind and unjust, and all too often bad things happen to good people and good things happen to bad people. 

In a cramped Pittsburgh apartment live two people who don’t have much. Material possessions don’t come easily to them. They’re more focused on getting enough money to pay the bills, keep their tiny home, and be able to turn a look at work. Neither of them thought that that was a big ask of life, but still come the end of the month there would be the stomach turning look of the bank accounts, the frantic searching of the frugal apartment to find every last penny, dime, and nickel, the arguments over the water use, the electricity, the gas, the sequinned gown that wasn’t really a necessity but got them $50 extra dollars so was it really worth the expense?

Good things didn’t happen to people like them. They weren’t convinced they were bad people, but they definitely smoked too much, drank till they couldn’t remember their own names, and didn’t always do the recycling. They were the sort of people who were destined to scrape along in life, never truly comfortable, but never in a completely hopeless situation. If the shower water was cold, they could still make a hot drink. If the electricity had been switched off, they had the back up gas burner to make a grilled cheese sandwich on. If everything had been switched off, they still had each other and a pile of soft blankets to cosy under together, and fantasise about what their lives would be like in five, ten, fifteen years time. If nothing else, they were happy.

Three years ago, one of Alaska’s favourite fantasies had started. The ‘what if I won RuPaul’s Drag Race, a bunch of cash, and we could quit our day jobs’ fantasy. Sharon had been sceptical from day one. She was less idealistic than Alaska, and was usually the one to fall asleep right in the middle of Alaska telling her about the suburban house with a picket fence she dreamed of moving into one day. She liked to tell Alaska she was just realistic, that drag race wasn’t made for queens like them, that they’d never want to even be associated with the Haus of Haunt. It didn’t seem to be the image that Ru and Logo were going for. But Alaska auditioned that first year nevertheless, enlisting a reluctant Sharon and a whole hoard of their friends to hold a shaky video camera whilst she showed the inside of their drag closet (pretending some of Sharon’s nicer pieces actually belonged to her), rolled around in drag trying to be as funny as she knew how, and filmed some clips of their infamous-in-Pittsburgh shows to really show the breadth of her talents. Then she spent three weeks editing it together, spending night after night hunched over in front of their battered PC, using a free programme she found online to pull the various clips together, not really knowing how to make them look good but hoping that her personality was so shining that the obviously-amateur quality of the video wouldn’t matter.

And then she sent it off, all of her hopes and dreams and secret wishes bundled onto one CD and packed into a small brown envelope.

A week passed, and she heard nothing. Sharon laughed when Alaska checked her emails incessantly, reminding her that these things took time and it would probably be a month or two before she heard anything. Alaska chose to ignore her, continuing her campaign of logging into her email account every ten minutes just in case they’d watched her amazing video and had decided to immediately cast her on season one of drag race. Sharon shook her head, brought Alaska another cup of coffee, and kissed her head.

And then a month went by, and there was still nothing. Sharon kept her cheery facade up, boosting Alaska every time she had a wobble about not being good enough, keeping the taller queen busy by making their performances bigger and better and bolder.

Before they knew it, two months had disappeared with radio silence on drag race’s end.

Then three months.

Then four.

Alaska’s mood had steadily dropped as time went on and they still heard nothing. Her drinking increased and she experimented more, rivalling Sharon’s legacy as the messiest queen in Pittsburgh. People had noticed, and were starting to ask questions. It was all Sharon could do to deflect their worried friends, and tried to keep Alaska out of bed and still working. The perpetual optimism that kept Alaska afloat had started to fade.

Sharon could do nothing but sit back and watch the slow destruction of everything Alaska had hoped for. She knew the queen had pinned everything on being on drag race, part of the promised cultural revolution, bringing drag to more people. Sharon wanted nothing to do with it, knowing that the ‘people’ would never accept what they did with the Haus of Haunt, and she only wished Alaska could have seen the same thing. It would have saved them nights of heartache and pain, when all Alaska could do after a show was collapse into Sharon’s arms and have a messy drunken weep, before falling asleep and waking up the next day to repeat the routine.

But time is a great healer, and slowly Alaska started to emerge from the ashes of her dreams, a new fire lit under her to become a better drag queen and a better person.

There was a focus appearing that had never been there before, that had been missing in the days Alaska had been quite happy to smudge some eyeshadow and draw on a brow, before falling drunk on stage and taking part in whatever they’d cooked up that evening. Sharon couldn’t say she was happy about it, but she was intrigued.

And so they entered a new era of their drag, growing both as drag queens and as partners. Neither of them had been in love before, and so they were exploring this new chapter of their lives together, falling into a routine that felt as natural and easy as breathing. Alaska knew she’d found her soulmate, and Sharon couldn’t see her future without anyone else in it. The time they spent together became more precious to them than time they spent anywhere else, both on and off stage. And of course they watched season one of RuPaul’s Drag Race, Sharon providing enough bitchy commentary about the contestants that Alaska’s heart was soothed, and she could enjoy it. Both of them held their breath as Bebe Zahara Benet was crowned, knowing in their hearts that Ru had started something that was going to change drag and the way the world viewed drag forever.

Alaska vowed right then and there that she would get on the show, no matter what she had to do to make it happen. Sharon kept quiet, knowing that if the same calibre of queen was cast season after season, Alaska didn’t have a chance in hell of making it on the show, let alone winning.

And so Alaska got started on her second audition for drag race, filming it on the same camera in the same apartment with the same friends, editing it on the same shitty programme that had probably been developed for use ten years earlier, filling her tape with as much Alaska as she possibly could. She filmed and refilmed for weeks, taking her camera to every performance they did in the hopes of catching something new, finding new props and refilming scenes she’d already edited into the footage. Sharon watched this whirlwind in a state of proud bemusement, having never really seen anyone get so neurotic over a few minutes of video footage, but knowing Alaska was making it the best that Alaska could. She even consented to come in for a few seconds, telling the blank eye-like lense of the camera what made Alaska so special as a drag queen. She’d never admit it, but she’d had to pinch her palm to stop the tears from flowing.

It was the same wait this time around, and the same outcome. Alaska heard nothing, and another year passed. They curled up under the same blankets on the same ratty couch, shivering in the same cold as they watched a new set of queens strut their stuff on the TV, Sharon being sure to be even cattier about this new season to quell the tears that bubbled beneath the surface as Alaska’s heart longed to be on that TV screen, being a part of the iconic looks and fights that they knew even then would last longer than the actual show itself.

And then Tyra was crowned and Alaska started on her audition tape for season three, knowing that over the past year she’d only gotten better and their performances had only gotten wilder and their love had only grown stronger.

“This is going to be my year babe, I can feel it,” Alaska had told Sharon more than once as she breezed past, camera in hand, eyeliner flicked up to heaven.

They watched Raja being crowned a year later, still under the same blanket on the same couch, sharing the same space and trading the same comments.

But this time there was a sense of hope in the air that hadn’t been there for the past two seasons. Both of them watched Raja, a seasoned fashion queen with a fresh look, and thought that maybe there was room for their type of drag after all. But Sharon was still cautious, and met Alaska’s look of hope with one of reason, reminding her that Raja’s style of drag was still easy to understand and readily marketable in a way that their drag wasn’t. Sharon watched the newly rekindled dream dim, and hated herself.

She hated herself even more when Alaska came to her three days later and cajoled Sharon into making and sending off an audition tape of her own, knowing that Alaska knew her better than she knew herself. Drag race had always been Alaska’s dream, not Sharon’s, and as much as the spooky queen would have loved to have sent in an audition tape a year ago, she hadn’t want to push herself into Alaska’s space, instead taking the backseat to let her boyfriend shine. But now Alaska was in front of her with shining eyes and a hopeful smile, asking Sharon to enter too, asking Sharon to throw all her caution to the wind and put herself out there.

When Sharon sent off her tape, she understood why Alaska had been so up and down and all over the place over the past few years of drag race auditioning. It was one thing to stand on stage and laugh in the face of ugly bigots who you didn’t care about. It was another thing entirely to try and make people with such intimate knowledge of how the drag race community worked understand why you did what you did.

And then they both heard back.

Sharon had never heard Alaska scream in the way she did when she opened the email, and was told that she’d made it to the next round. It was only topped by Sharon receiving exactly the same news, and then that was topped by Sharon- well, Alaska couldn’t walk the next morning.

Then began the interviews and the joint interviews and the explaining over and over again to faces that blended from one into the next, each person asking the same questions about who they were and what they did and who exactly was the Haus of Haunt? Painstakingly Alaska and then Sharon took the interviewers through their early life and their drag journey’s, both stories starting out so differently but ending in the same place: under their blankets, on the ratty couch, wrapped in each other’s arms.

Eventually they received the news even Alaska had begun to think would never come: they’d made it into the top fourteen. Not just one of them, both of them. Even Sharon, cautious, realistic Sharon joined in when Alaska started fantasising about them being the first couple to grace the main stage of RuPaul’s Drag Race, taking their style and making it accessible for all of the people out there who felt different, who wanted to see someone like them on stage and not a beautiful, ethereal pageant queen. They never said it out loud, but both of them secretly hoped that finally, after so many years of hardship, strife, makeup, and love, that good things were going to start happening to them, that maybe they were, after all, good people.

Then they’d received an email that had chilled both of them to their very cores. For the first time in this whole casting process for season four, they were being asked to interview separately. Not only that, but they were being asked to be in separate houses. They didn’t know what this meant, but they knew it couldn’t be good.

Projecting the happiest front she could, knowing she was probably about to get the chop from the audition process, Sharon set Alaska up in front of their new-but-old laptop, made sure she had a cup of coffee, gave her one last kiss, and departed for one of their closest friends house. The lasting image of an expectant Alaska poised in front of the laptop, her eyes begging for good news, seared itself into Sharon’s brain.

Alaska got the call first, the skype tone blaring into the house that was too silent and too small without Sharon to fill it. She hated being in the house without Sharon, and wished more than anything that the queen was sat next to her now, holding her hand through this last stage of the process like she had done for every stage over the past few years. But she was alone, and this was it, the final call. Either she’d be on, or she’d have fallen at the last hurdle. Alaska moved the mouse with a trembling hand and accepted her fate.

The waiting period for Sharon was the worst. She’d gotten to her friends house in good time, and gotten their laptop set up, skype opening and waiting and weighing on her mind. She was convinced that she was about to be told that Alaska had been cast on the show and she was out, that she was just too weird and too out there and too unpolished, that the dream she’d only just been able to start letting herself dream was over before it had even started. That Alaska’s dream of them being the first Drag Race couple was over. It was a stupid dream anyway.

Alaska flashed her best smile as the pixelated man on the screen consulted a piece of paper in front of him. They chatted for a few moment’s, Alaska telling him about last night’s performance and how incredible Sharon had been, her voice getting faster and higher and louder as she raced to fill the empty, awkward silence that she couldn’t let hang between them.

Sharon knew the second she answered her own call, the beaming smile of the woman shocking her out of her preplanned speech about how happy she was to make it this far. She had to ask her to repeat the news, before asking whether or not they were calling the wrong person.

Alaska had to ask the man to repeat the news, the muffling in her ears rendering her unsure of whether or not she’d heard him properly.

Sharon screamed.

Alaska screamed.

One was on, and one was off.

Sharon was going to be a contestant on RuPaul’s Drag Race Season 4. Alaska was told to try again next year.

Alaska screamed.

Sharon screamed.

One dream realised, one dream dashed. One couple caught in the middle, their lives so intertwined they’d been certain that this dream was one that they could share, that they had to share, that they were so meant for each other that the only reason Alaska hadn’t been cast on drag race yet was because she hadn’t auditioned with Sharon, and that now they were doing it together there was no other possible outcome.

Alaska sobbed, the house becoming smaller and quieter around her with the absence of her dreams and her love.

Sharon stared at the email she’d been sent with the information about what to do next, wondering how she could ever go home and face Alaska.

One door opens, another closes.

Turns out, bad things and good things just happen, no matter who you are.


End file.
